Siobhan Marie Doherty: Theater outside of a theater

Actor Siobhan Marie Doherty performs with the Roryography Holiday Dance Party team in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

Like many other local actors piecing together a living in the Bay Area, Siobhan Marie Doherty doesn’t always ply her craft in a traditional theater.

She’ll be in one for part of the run of “The Tenderloin Tour,” Cutting Ball Theater’s truncated revival of its 2012 work of documentary theater based on interviews with real-life residents and workers of the theater’s neighborhood.

But the company also will move the show beyond its standard venue, the Exit on Taylor, and into nearby nonprofits and community sites. Included in the Jan. 9-26 run are performances at Glide and the main branch of San Francisco Public Library, the Tenderloin Museum and Boeddeker Park.

For Doherty, doing theater outside of a theater is par for the course. The 35-year-old Bay Area native — she grew up in Palo Alto — has brought her acting talents to incarcerated youth; to video game voiceover; to classroom trainings for police, teachers and medical students — and even to the airport.

Her work with youth in the criminal justice system came out of the 2012 run of “Tenderloin.” (For the 2019 run, Doherty is one of two returning cast members; she also conducted some of the interviews and collaborated on writing the script.) Fellow actor David Westley Skillman, who was going to be in the original cast but then had to leave the show because of scheduling concerns, introduced Doherty to local nonprofit Each One Reach One, which works with incarcerated youth (and which recently merged with Success Centers). One of its programs teaches a playwriting class to teenage participants, culminating in a reading of their scripts by professional actors.

“I was immediately hooked,” Doherty says of being part of that program. As an actor, you help “give voice to these emotions that teenagers never want to show themselves.”

The teens have to write their plays in metaphor. “We do this for a couple reasons,” says Doherty. “One, it makes them be more creative. They have to figure out how a dog would swear or what a dog wants most in life. … Also, it gives them a bit of a mask: ‘I’m writing about this dog; I’m not writing about me.’ Also, it lets them talk about things that really matter to them, but they wouldn’t be allowed to talk about otherwise.”

With that method, “these kids sort of tap into this poetry, whether they even really realize it or not.”

Siobhan Marie Doherty (right) performs with the Roryography Holiday Dance Party team in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

For the past year, Doherty has been working with another population for whom theater might not come naturally: passengers at San Francisco International Airport.

You might have seen musicians performing at the airport, especially over the holidays, as part of the airport marketing team’s efforts to make air travel less stressful and more enjoyable. Hiring actors is a relatively new technique under the same umbrella.

Actor Siobhan Marie Doherty performs with the Roryography Holiday Dance Party team in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

Once, the actors dressed up as beatniks and read aloud bad poetry, some of which passengers could fill in, Mad Libs-style. Another time, they taught a dance class; the food court was the dance floor. For last year’s holidays, the actors lounged in front of a ski lodge backdrop, with hot cocoa and the therapy dogs of the Wag Brigade for passengers to pet.

“It’s really just about calming people down at the airport, or breaking people out of their routines a little bit, or just taking a breath,” Doherty says. As silly as it all sounds, for some passengers, it’s meaningful. Doherty recalls that at the dance class, one woman told her, “I’m flying back from visiting my daughter. She’s very, very ill. I usually dance every morning … but it’s been about two weeks, three weeks since I’ve danced, and it felt so good to dance with you guys.”

Actor Siobhan Marie Doherty performs with the Roryography Holiday Dance Party team in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

Most passengers think the actors are selling something. Many warm up when they realize, say, the therapy dogs are free and for them to play with. Others, Doherty says, “are like, ‘Get out of my way. I’ve got somewhere to be.’ ”

She has to have a thick skin for this line of work, but “I think you have to have a thick skin as a performer in general,” Doherty says.

Actor Siobhan Marie Doherty (left) goes over a song list with her fellow performers Rory Davis (center) and Max Maliga of the Roryography Holiday Dance Party team before performing in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco. Photo: Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

When Doherty uses her theater background to help train future doctors, police officers and teachers, she deals with a different kind of awkwardness. With the medical students, at UCSF and Stanford, she’s what’s called a “standardized patient,” or a pretend patient on whom doctors might practice performing exams or having difficult conversations. Often, “they’re very young,” Doherty says, “and they put on the white coat, and they feel like a complete fraud.”

They can be “robotic” in the beginning, especially the men, she says. When they have to do a heart exam, “they have to put the stethoscope near your breast, and they’re very nervous about it, and they don’t know how to ask for it, and their discomfort is so visible that it makes you uncomfortable — but how else would you get past that, except by doing it?”

Doherty’s cheery, calming voice and presence make her a natural for that kind of work. That also made her a perfect match for the character of Mary Ann Finch in the 2012 production of “Tenderloin.” Finch, of San Francisco’s Care Through Touch Institute, is a masseuse who focuses on touch therapy for the homeless. One of her other characters was a former Tenderloin resident who, after suffering domestic violence, returned to her old neighborhood to report the crime because that’s where she felt safest.

Tristan Cunningham (left), Michael Uy Kelly, Rebecca Frank, David Sinaiko, Leigh Shaw and Siobhan Marie Doherty told the stories of people who work and live in the Tenderloin in Cutting Ball Theater’s original production of “Tenderloin.” Photo: Cutting Ball Theatre, Cutting Ball Theater, 2012

Since the 2012 run, Doherty says, “I’ve been emailing (Cutting Ball) like every year, or every two years, being like, ‘Hey, are you guys bringing it back?’ ”

“I think that the issues that it brings up are only getting more intense,” Doherty says, as tech wealth has moved into or near the Tenderloin even as its poverty and homelessness continue to stand out. Audiences today “will be able to reflect about, ‘Oh, this has changed,’ or, ‘This hasn’t changed.’ ”